Agency promises more robust measures to force CCGs to disclose gifts and hospitality given to all their staff

NHS England is to create four regional committees to “rationalise” medicines evaluation in an attempt to reduce the influence of the pharmaceutical industry on commissioners’ spending and prescribing decisions.

These committees will ensure that medicines evaluation will be done only once nationally and the work then is then shared across the NHS.

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Simon Stevens said the changes ‘protect the purity of the decision making’

The national body has also outlined proposals to make clinical commissioning groups “promptly” declare gifts and hospitality given to all their staff and produce a publicly available register of these gifts.

A paper presented to NHS England’s board meeting on Thursday states: “These [regional medicines optimisation] committees will work together and ensure medicines evaluation will be done once only and the output shared across the NHS and help support medicines optimisation more generally.

“This means that local medicines formulary committees [which currently make choices over which drugs to buy] will be far less involved in processes that the pharmaceutical industry may seek to influence.

“It also reduces the wasteful multiple requests for the same information being made by the NHS [and] by the pharmaceutical sector.”

Speaking at the meeting NHS England chief executive Simon Stevens said: “Some of the concern that has arisen locally has been around the distributed decision making around pharmaceutical formularies at CCG level and the sort of advice they are receiving.

“We will rationalise these medicines and formularies committees so there aren’t oodles of them dotted around the country, subject to these kinds of strange influences.

“I think that will have the benefit both of protecting the purity of the decision making processes and also from the point of view of the pharmaceutical industry, reducing the multiple number of points of interaction they have so that there is a clearer, transparent and more streamlined process.”

HSJ understands that the four regional committees will not replace medicines optimisation teams within CCGs and that they will continue to be involved in the optimisation process.